


Postlapsarian

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, Show level violence, biblical retelling, implied rape, slaughter of animals for food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 16:03:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3656478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of the first murder, SPN-style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postlapsarian

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peas_fics](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=peas_fics).



> Written for [SPN Spring Fling](spnspringfling.livejournal.com), for the prompt, "Life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short."
> 
> Many thanks to [Museaway](http://archiveofourown.org/users/museaway/pseuds/museaway) for a swift and helpful last-minute beta.

It wasn’t until many years later that Cain thought to pity the animals. The thought presented itself around the hundredth time he got stung, as if it were a summary of his decades of beekeeping. He loved his bees as he’d loved few things, and the sight of them tearing themselves apart to mildly annoy him lodged in his head.  
  
The angels had given his parents some measure of explanation, however cryptic and unsatisfactory, when they were cast out into the cursed earth. The animals had not been warned. The lambs nuzzled at the jaws of the wolves that came to devour the flock, and the gazelles tried to frolic with young lions. As a child, Cain had only needed to stand still in the woods with his arms extended, an apple in his hand. The deer crept up to him of their own accord, and when they were nibbling on the fruit he broke their necks. By the time he had children of his own, the deer had learned to be wary. Natural selection, the men on television would call it.  
  
Cain was born after the end of the story, into an aged, dying world destroyed by a disaster he hadn’t been alive to see. The white sun beat down on their wretched mud hut and small field in silent judgment. His earliest memories are his father’s stories about Eden, how beautiful it was and how innocent they’d been. About Lucifer and the forbidden fruit. His father would say, “and then your mother—“ and she would cut him off with, “It was you who—“ and they would fight. They seldom talked to each other, except to argue.   
  
They seldom talked to him at all. They didn’t fully understand what a child was or what they were meant to do with one. They let him run wild until they noticed he could be useful, and then they gave him orders he mostly ignored. They’d had no calendar, so he doesn’t know how old he was when his mother started to show. Old enough to be pulling weeds and skinning the rabbits he caught in the lettuce, young enough he didn’t know how she got with child. She said his father put a person inside her, and that it would grow until it tore her open to get out, as Cain had done to her before. This was how God had punished her, just as God had punished Cain while he was still in his mother’s body by staining his soul with Original Sin.  
  
Cain expected what came out of his mother to be a boy like himself. But after the screaming was over and he was allowed back into the hut, the thing that tore out of her was just a small, bloody grub, a parody of a human with a head too big to lift and tiny, useless limbs. It looked more like a skinned rabbit than a man. Father said Cain had looked the same when he was born, but he couldn’t believe it.   
  
For months the creature did nothing but cry like a wounded animal, without tears. It sounded like it was dying, and Cain wished it would. His mother disliked it almost as much as he did, for how it had hurt her and fed on her flesh, and she would often set it down in a corner and leave it there for hours. It redoubled its cries in protest, as if it would punish them all for ignoring it. One night, after many sleepless hours spent listening to it cry, Cain crept over to the corner where it lay and placed his hand firmly over its mouth and nose, until it grew quiet. His mother opened her eyes and watched him, but said nothing. Cain had no murder in his heart. He didn’t understand that he could take the creature’s life as easily as that of a rabbit or a deer. If his father hadn’t woken up and struck him, the story of Cain and Abel might have ended that night.   
  
But it didn’t, and Abel grew. After a few months he was no longer the blotchy, dull-eyed rag doll he’d been when he’d first appeared. His gaze was clever, and he responded to human language in coos and babble that sounded almost like words. When Cain fed him berries and scraps of cooked meat, Abel smiled. No one had ever smiled at Cain like that before. It stirred something in him that made him give the baby the best of his food, and chatter to him about the crops, animals, and weather, even when Abel could only gaze back with wide, uncomprehending eyes. He held Abel when he went to sleep at night, and didn’t think to call his contentment love. That was a word that had so far been reserved for the God he’d never seen.  
  
Abel was a happy child, so happy that the word had to be invented to describe him. Their family’s small vocabulary had had no need of it before. He ran behind Cain in the fields, his arms extended, pretending he was a bird, drew pictures of the four of them in the dirt, and invented strange little stories about imaginary people—mothers, fathers, and brothers who had adventures in faraway lands.   
  
He would not kill, and Cain sometimes thought his first mistake lay in not making him. Abel screamed, cried, and set his little jaw at the sight of blood, too squeamish even to snap a rabbit’s neck, though he ate the meat Cain gave him gladly enough. Cain was too fond, and gave in when Abel cried. Cain didn’t mind killing. He’d been doing it all his life.  
  
Abel found other ways to be useful. He had a quiet, deep-rooted patience that allowed him slowly to tame the wild sheep, and herd them according to his will. When the time for slaughter came Abel handed the blade to Cain and walked away, eyes averted. Abel spent his days out in the pastures, drawing geometric shapes on the stones, or human figures caught in the middle of some mysterious narrative. He trained the rhythms of his voice until he could shape his words into songs. Cain heard the sweet rise and fall on the wind when he was in the fields, and he didn’t know where it ended and his own thoughts began. They were one soul in two bodies, Cain rooted near the hut, among the sparse crops and the bones of animals, Abel bright-spirited and free to fly, but tethered always to his brother.  
  
When they reached the age of sexual curiosity a pair of sisters came wandering out of the forest, shy and trusting as deer, murmuring to each other in a language no one recognized. Cain never did know if they were a gift from the angels, or if they were a sign that the human race was already well underway somewhere else. Abel lured them in, patient herder that he was, smiling and speaking softly in sing-song, leaving little gifts of fruit ever-closer to camp. After a week of this seduction they succeeded in grabbing the girls and making them wives. If they objected, Cain didn’t understand their language, and so couldn’t tell.   
  
The sisters—if sisters they were—seemed less troubled than Mother had been to find themselves with child, and responded to their babies with a measure of affection Cain’s parents had never known enough to show. It boded well for the human race, and Cain was as happy as he knew how to be.   
  
For a time Abel seemed happy too, inventing games for the children and singing when the family gathered around the fire. But his spirit was restless, and his eyes grew dark as he watched the bloody limbs of the sheep quartered for roasting.   
  
After his first daughter was born, Abel took to wandering away from their encampment at night. The woods were the hunting ground of wolves and lions, and so far as Cain knew there was no one there to meet.  
  
Cain followed, and found Abel with his eyes fixed to a low tree branch, lips moving as if he were in heated conversation, but making no sound. It reminded Cain of the stories his father told of his mother and the serpent, and he shoved Abel to wake him from his trance. Abel protested his innocence only briefly before he admitted the truth.   
  
“There’s no justice in God’s rule. We never sinned, but our children are born in blood and will die in blood, like the sheep. So will you and I. If we help Lucifer storm the gates of Heaven we can go home, and we’ll suffer no more.” The word “justice” was a word that Cain knew only second hand, the word the angels used when they explained why his parents had to leave Eden. It had no relationship to anything he’d ever experienced. He wasn’t a dreamer like his brother, and all he understood of God and Lucifer was that they were implacable, supernatural predators who would shred Abel, and not just once but over and over for all time. He begged Abel to forget his hopes, but he could see in his brother’s eyes his heart was set on this fantasy of escape. Cain pretended to give in, and Abel accepted it. He was used to getting his own way.  
  
That morning Cain went to the woods, claiming he meant to hunt, and found Lucifer there with an ease that startled him. He’d expected a fight or a journey, but the Serpent was dangling calmly from a tree scarcely a hundred yards in, shrewd and yellow-eyed, looking less like a flesh-and-blood snake than one of Abel’s impressionistic, two-dimensional drawings brought to life. Cain had no talent for stories, but he tried, starting in on a speech about how precious Abel was to him.  
  
The Serpent cut him off. “Kill him, then, and come work for me.” It sounded bored. “His soul will rise up to Heaven, God willing. Or let him kill you, and he’ll fight in my army in your stead. But whatever you do, don’t look to my traitorous brothers in Heaven for help. They hate you even more than they hate me. Look at the terrible curse they’ve laid upon your soul for the sin of being born.” The Serpent’s coil twitched in a gesture that might almost have been a shrug. “Do as you will, but do it today. Tomorrow I take him and we rise up against the Oppressor.” It disappeared.   
  
Cain walked back toward the pasture, where he found Abel asleep among the sheep. He watched his brother and considered the blank, animal flatness of his days before Abel arrived to give them shape and depth. He considered the vulturous appetites of the warring angels who had brought humanity to these dark final days. He considered how little he belonged in the pretty, bloodless Eden his parents left behind. But Abel did. Cain knew what he had to do.   
  
He braced himself for pain, as if he were about sever a limb, and picked up the animal jaw he’d sharpened for slaughter. If he stopped to consider what the act meant he’d never finish it. In a single gesture he took up the blade and swung it once across his brother’s throat, quick and efficient, the same way he bled the sheep. Abel’s eyes opened as he choked on blood. Cain knelt beside him and murmured the same nonsense words he had when Abel was small, until Abel stopped struggling and lay still on the ground. Cain had never seen a man die before. Abel’s eyes were as empty as the eyes of a dead sheep.   
  
Lucifer fondly carved a mark of ownership in Cain’s arm, and Cain didn’t walk the earth again for many years. He fought for Lucifer in the liminal dreamscapes of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, swinging his butcher’s blade against an endless stream of painted monsters, bloodless and unconvincing. By the time he returned to the world of the living it had changed beyond recognition, populated by thousands of people who had built their encampments up into great and filthy cities. Most were the children of Seth, an after-born brother he’d never known, but here and there he saw his own descendants, fierce-eyed and pragmatic. They made good Knights of Hell.   
  
Less often he found Abel in the face of a poet or a philosopher, in the face of someone who lived gladly among killers, but had no stomach for blood. They made good demons too, tender and sympathetic to the suffering mortals they met at the crossroads, luring them in like deer. He saw Abel in Collette’s face, and felt a warm spark of love he hadn’t experienced since he was a mortal man.  
  
He tried with all his might to change the arc of the story when he relived it, to keep her safe from the world, from herself, and from him. He failed. The murder was less direct the second time around, but only slightly. Cain had shaped Abaddon into a weapon as surely as he’d once shaped his blade, and when she fell on Collette it was no one’s fault but his own.   
  
He tried to stop after that, for her sake and Abel’s. He had no heart to be a shepherd, to live with the dark, frightened eyes of the sheep eternally on his bloody hands, but beekeeping is a kind of herding too, and he came to love the bees for their mindless innocence, for the teeming cities they built without the burden of guilt and pain that men inevitably bring to all they do.   
  
It was the descendant who came to his door, demanding the mark and the blade it represented, who broke his resolve. Not in the way that man might have imagined, by tempting him the way a drunk is tempted by drink, but by reminding him of the vast plain of suffering he’d turned his back on when he took the mark and walked away from the earth.  
  
There’s a twelve year old boy in Ohio, and in the child’s eyes Cain can see his own blood, and Abel’s too. These days few people have one without the other. A clean slice across the throat and the boy can cause no more pain, a clean slice across the throat and he can feel none. It would’ve been more merciful for everyone if Cain had kept his hand over the infant Abel’s mouth a minute longer. Alone he would never have succeeded in luring the sisters out of the woods, and the whole cursed line would’ve stopped dead. All he can do now is mitigate his mistake. Through the window he watches the boy play by himself, as Abel once had. Poor little wolf, poor little lamb. He blasts open the door and steps inside. 


End file.
